• Punk cabaret diva and first-rate belter Storm Large recounts her life with a bipolar mother as well as her own sexual awakening and exploration in the memoir “Crazy Enough” (Free Press, 2012)
• “Film Noir: The Directors” (Limelight Editions, 2012), edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini features queer filmmaker Nicholas Ray and the iconic Ida Lupino among its many subjects.
Trans-formative texts
• Featuring a new epilogue, the paperback edition of “Transition: Becoming Who I Was Always Meant to Be” (Plume, 2011/2012) by Chaz Bono is the triumphant story of the most famous trans man of our time.
• “Transitions of the Heart: Stories of Love, Struggle and Acceptance by Mothers of Transgender and Gender Variant Children” (Cleis, 2012) edited by Rachel Pepper, consists of 32 essays written by mothers from all walks of life.
Poetry of Pride
• “He Will Laugh” (Lethe Press, 2012), Doug Ray’s powerful debut poetry collection relates the story of how two young men met, fell in love, and the profound impact of the suicide of one of them.
• Something to look forward to in September — prolific lesbian writer (and author of “Heather Has Two Mommies”), Leslea Newman offers “October Mourning” (Candlewick Press, 2012), a cycle of poems about Matthew Shepard.
Telling the truth
• Edited by Sarah Moon, with contributing editor James Lecesne, the Y/A anthology “The Letter Q” (Arthur A Levine Books/Scholastic, 2012), features more than 60 writers and illustrators corresponding with “their younger selves.”
• Written and illustrated (with watercolors) by the late gay writer Clyde Phillip Wachsberger, “Into The Garden with Charles” (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2012) is a memoir about “growing old and falling in love.”
• Picking up where Clint Eastwood’s Hoover biopic “J. Edgar” left off, Darwin Porter’s “J. Edgar Hoover & Clyde Tolson” (Blood Moon, 2012), promised to be an investigation into “the sexual secrets of America’s most famous men and women.”
• Told in brief, insightful essays, “Red Nails, Black Skates: Gender, Cash, and Pleasure On and Off the Ice” (Duke University Press, 2012) tells of queer critic Erica Rand’s experiences in the slippery world of ice skating.
Fictionally speaking
• Earning her comparisons to Mary Renault, Madeline Miller’s acclaimed novel “The Song of Achilles” (Ecco, 2012) retells the “Iliad” with a queer twist.
• The debut novel by BoiParty.com co-director and head promoter Justin Like Zirilli, “Gulliver Takes Manhattan” (Amazon Encore, 2012), tells the story of the titular Gulliver who escapes to New York to make a new beginning, leaving everything behind in L.A.
• In the historical romance “Purgatory” (Bear Bones Books, 2012), poet and writer Jeff Mann writes about two young Civil War soldiers, fighting on opposite sides, but falling in love.